Reading, Understanding, And Applying A Written Standard-Part 1
Feb 06, 2024Season 2Episode 32
Rip Stalvey, John Gunterman, and Mandelyn Royal
Venture back in time with us to a world where standardbred poultry was prized as much for their ability to lay eggs or grace our dinner tables as they were for their feathers. In our latest chat, we lift the veil on the historical tapestry of poultry breed standards, moving beyond the glossy sheen of the exhibition to reveal their profound influence on the breeds we adore today. From the Rhode Island Reds to the industrious Leghorns, we trace the impact of the 1874 American Standard of Perfection and its ripple effect on uniformity and consumer desires, linking it all back to the era of bustling live poultry markets.
We navigate the nuanced dance of breeding to the standards, sharing the wisdom gleaned from years of experience. As we discuss the Rhode Island Reds' early laying prowess and the Leghorns' evolution, we confront the economic choices that shape our feathered friends. We warn of the dangers of "coop blindness" and offer insights into the art of balanced breeding, highlighting strategies that preserve vigor and breed identity. Whether you're a breeder with a passion for heritage or simply curious about the clucking creatures that roam our yards, this episode is an incubator of knowledge, poised to hatch a richer understanding of poultry's past, present, and future.
Venture back in time with us to a world where standardbred poultry was prized as much for their ability to lay eggs or grace our dinner tables as they were for their feathers. In our latest chat, we lift the veil on the historical tapestry of poultry breed standards, moving beyond the glossy sheen of the exhibition to reveal their profound influence on the breeds we adore today. From the Rhode Island Reds to the industrious Leghorns, we trace the impact of the 1874 American Standard of Perfection and its ripple effect on uniformity and consumer desires, linking it all back to the era of bustling live poultry markets.
We navigate the nuanced dance of breeding to the standards, sharing the wisdom gleaned from years of experience. As we discuss the Rhode Island Reds' early laying prowess and the Leghorns' evolution, we confront the economic choices that shape our feathered friends. We warn of the dangers of "coop blindness" and offer insights into the art of balanced breeding, highlighting strategies that preserve vigor and breed identity. Whether you're a breeder with a passion for heritage or simply curious about the clucking creatures that roam our yards, this episode is an incubator of knowledge, poised to hatch a richer understanding of poultry's past, present, and future.
Hi and welcome to the Poultry Keepers podcast. I'm Mandolin Royall and I'm here together with Rip Stalvey and John Gunterman, and we're your co-host for this show and it's our mission to help you have happy, healthy and a productive flock. When you read your breeds written standard, does it make your head hurt? Does it leave you feeling maybe a little bit confused? Well, front, no more, because coming up, we're going to explain how you can demystify those troublesome written standards like a pro.
Speaker 2:
So what is the purpose of the breed standard?
Speaker 3:
Well, if you look it up, you're going to find something to the effect that breed standards help define the ideal animal of a breed and provide gold for breeders for improving stock. A lot of folks think the whole purpose of the standard is for exhibition purposes only, but that's not the case at all because, as we're going to get into it a little bit, standard bred poultry that we have today were the commercial breed.
Speaker 2:
This goes for all animals and there's standards for dogs and cows and goats and sheep, and this is not unique to the poultry world and just about every animal that we've domesticated has a breed standard somewhere.
Speaker 3:
Exactly, and I think maybe before we get off into how to read and interpret and apply a standard, let's take a look and get a little historical perspective. Actually, poultry shows are among the oldest of livestock competition. They started at agricultural fairs, regional competitions and whatever, and the goal for most of those competition was to find the best looking and performing individual animal and, just like hogs or cows or horses or sheep, quality birds brought more money on the market. So the better your birds were, the more you could get for your hatching age. For example, if you look up the value of back from around 1920 or so, you'll see that they were selling a setting of hacking egg for five dollars.
Speaker 1:
Back then, that's a lot.
Speaker 3:
That was a lot of money.
Speaker 2:
That was a huge investment, though that was being made and it was looked at way.
Speaker 3:
That's the equivalent of today's dollars of about 300 bucks Wow.
Speaker 1:
But that's on par for quality, though, and if it's getting you started into a new flock, that your breakfast will hinge on it, your dinner will hinge on it, because these were productive birds, not just pretty birds.
Speaker 3:
Exactly.
Speaker 2:
If you're the local farmer that's raising these and you're bringing home the blue ribbons at the fair, other locals are going to want to explore your genetics and it's just going to help strengthen the local population base and regionally acclimate that strain of bird, which is also really helpful. That's the way it happened until we started shipping eggs and chicks all over the country.
Speaker 1:
Oh yeah, before shipping was a thing and before the standards were really in there for the American Poultry Association standards, you may have a breed regionally looking one way and then another breeder in a separate region. They would look a little bit different just because those genetics were so split up by regions. When the standards came about, it made it a little bit easier for folks to get on the same page with what the birds should look like and to get away from some of those regional variations. And then with shipping you were able to see that consistency come along a little bit better.
Speaker 3:
Hey, I got a question for you. You know when the first American Standard of Perfection was written 1874. 1874. So we've had a standard of perfection for a very long time Now. Admittedly, the first standard I've got a copy. It is pretty slim in comparison to the standards we have today. It was about the size of a half sheet of paper and that was probably only half an inch thick. So it's changed a lot, it's grown a lot and it's become more detailed. Now we have many illustrations compared to what they used to have.
Speaker 2:
Oh, the shillen paintings are exquisite.
Speaker 1:
Thanks to me, decided to use illustrations rather than photographs.
Speaker 3:
Correct.
Speaker 2:
Do you know what that is?
Speaker 3:
You can paint it perfect, right, john, an artist can do a perfect representation of what the breed should look like. One thing that led to the standards development and to a lot of the things we have today is we began to see a population shift from a rural base to more of an urban base. But you know, people wanted the birds they were familiar with, the taste, the eggs they were familiar with. Sometimes there was preference, regional preference, for shell colors, whether they're brown or white, they were white and so that began to diversify our breed. But remember the standard, like we talked about earlier. The standard bred bee were the commercial birds of their day. There were no modern hybrids up until about 1940. Chicken of Tamara contest. About then there was a big demand on the consumers part for very uniform looking carcasses and eggs and the carcasses back then were a little bit all over the scale, from really skinny birds to fairly plump and juicy, although not anything like we have today in the Cornish cross bird.
Speaker 1:
Still on the lines of like a wine dote.
Speaker 2:
Yes, yeah, but people would also go to their butcher regularly and they would get the chicken fairly fresh and they would get it sized for its immediate use.
Speaker 3:
Oh, and some areas they even had live poultry markets where you went in the back and you pointed out the birds that you wanted and they take it out and process it for you. You couldn't get much pressure than that.
Speaker 1:
My great grandfather in Iowa owned a grocery store and he was off the boat. European opened up his store in rural Iowa in a small, small town. I can't remember the name of the town, but my dad was letting me know that one reason why my grandfather never wanted to have poultry no turkey, no chicken. So holidays my grandma always had to do a roast beef because he was the kid in the back of the store doing the chickens for the customers.
Speaker 1:
And so he would take birds in. My great-great grandfather would take them in and just put them in the back. He would take them as trade, as currency, because that's just how it was, that far back.
Speaker 3:
Oh, there was a lot of bartering going on.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, there was barter, and there was not any refrigeration either, so you stored them live until somebody needed them.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, there's really no chance of spoilage if it's alive and you could feed it.
Speaker 1:
I do like that.
Speaker 2:
In a store like that, you're always gonna have staling and spoiling products that you can give to the chickens. You're not keeping them alive for very long.
Speaker 3:
And in the mid 1940s we began to see a shift from the standard bred birds to the modern commercial hybrid bird. The real problem with hybrid bird and commercial birds of the day is they're not a sustainable breed. You can't breed them together and get an exact replica of what you started with.
Speaker 2:
Well, the Cornish Cross is a terminal cross by design.
Speaker 3:
As we begin to shift away from standard bred poultry. Were it not for the exhibition people, a lot of the breeds that we have today would have been the law forever.
Speaker 1:
Some of them are already on the way out if they don't pick up their dedicated breeders to keep them going.
Speaker 2:
There's several that were thought to have been extinct and were only found quite by accident, and that would be a fun show at some point to talk about.
Speaker 3:
The Lomonas. They were gone, but they were able to go back and recreate the breed using the same combination of breeds that were originally used to develop.
Speaker 1:
So long as those breeders took good note, you can bring them back. But if there's no documentation of how it was done, then they very well could be lost forever.
Speaker 2:
Well, this is when Citizen Science was, that People were doing this breeding and development, recording their results, and they were sharing it back and forth in trade publications that they'd have to write letters to and wait to be published. And it was a different world back, before the internet and the telephone. But it was a concerted effort by the breed clubs to maintain the breeds that way.
Speaker 3:
I think today a lot of people mistakenly confuse the American standard of perfection with being for exhibition purposes only, and that's not the case.
Speaker 2:
It clearly states that in the standard.
Speaker 1:
If you read the beginning, the important part it has a lot more information in the beginning of the book. That's not necessarily breed specific, but it breaks down certain traits and if they're desirable or not, and it lists out examples of which breeds would have a certain trait. And it's not just about their feathers and their outside look, it's about how they feel, it's about how they're put together, because their type and their structure helps you get the blueprint for what the birds are supposed to be, which then helps their productive and utility traits.
Speaker 3:
Mandy. There's a section in the standard of perfection that gets so overlooked today, but it's basically the APA admonishing the breeders, the exhibitors and his own instances to judges Because they say here, interpretation of the standard for breeders, judges and exhibitors, all breed, okay. All breed, whether bred chiefly for economic purposes or for beauty of color and form, must be healthy and vigorous and of good productive qualities to ensure full propagation as well as popular acceptance of the breed. Judges and breeders therefore, in all cases are instructed to give full consideration to those fundamental characteristics which are necessary to maintain bigger and production at the highest level consistent. You know I come from an exhibition background and I will admit I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the production of my breed. It took me a while to come around to seeing the error of my ways. I've had Rhode Island red for years. Early on Rhode Island reds were phenomenal layers. There's been several records of Rhode Island red females back in the 1920s laying in excess of 280 to 300 eggs per hen per year.
Speaker 3:
I was doing good if I could squeeze out 80 to 100 eggs per hen back in the 1980s.
Speaker 1:
Those numbers that's only for their first year of production. Whenever we mention how many eggs they're laying, that references their first year, from six months old to about a year and a half old.
Speaker 2:
Right In a production environment like that. They were probably either bred just before going into the stew pot or going to the stew pot at the end of their first year, because they've worked hard.
Speaker 1:
Well them being dull purpose. Those males were going in the stew pot too.
Speaker 3:
You bet that's one of the primary reasons for having a dull purpose breed. It does a good job of laying and it does a good job of producing meat for the family to eat. If you want just egg layers, you don't want a dull purpose bird because the bodies are too big. The smaller bodies lay more eggs than larger bodies.
Speaker 1:
That's where leg horns can come into play. But I've seen some big ones off of some particular blood lines. Especially if you get into those exhibition leg horns, they don't look anything like the hatchery type, highly productive leg horns Night and day different.
Speaker 3:
I can remember back in the 50s when we first started keeping a production flock of white legged. You could buy white legged and cockle and raise them up pretty quickly to frying size. They had a pretty dang good body size on them at that point. White legged males today are not very big.
Speaker 2:
But the white legged horns of today are more egg production based by comparison, the commercial birds are the exhibition birds.
Speaker 1:
The commercial ones, they'll do 300 eggs a year.
Speaker 2:
Again, but why is there a difference?
Speaker 1:
If you put all breeding focus on those eggs and the frame for maximizing egg laying, and if you choose your most productive females just by that selection pressure, the birds may change in their look and size and type as you continually favor those who laid the best.
Speaker 3:
Well, Mandy, not only that. One thing that doesn't get talked about very much is and let's keep going with leg horns here back in the 50s, 40s and 50s, when legged were a fairly decent size compared to the legged we have today, it also became a matter of economic because those bigger body size birds cause more to raise and cause more to keep into production, Whereas the smaller body legged we have commercial birds today, are much less costly to raise and to keep in production. They just don't eat as much feed. So it's saying the farmer a ton of money and feed cost. And for our listeners out there, you may wonder sometimes why we really harp on his stress the importance of breeding birds to a written standard and that have good, bigger and production qualities. Well, what we've just been talking about is exactly the reason, because that's what the standard says. We should be doing that only birds that look right but are healthy, vigorous and lay a reasonable number of eggs for the breed when it comes to looking at the standards.
Speaker 1:
Most of the popular breeds are in the APA and there's some varieties that are not in the American Poultry Association standard. But they may have a standard in another country that is every bit as active and that's in the UK. That's through a lot of different European countries that Australia. They have their own standards through their own poultry organization. So if you don't have a US version because your breed isn't recognized yet, you can certainly default to the ones from the other countries so that you can see what you're aiming for with the variety that you have.
Speaker 3:
We're talking about the American standard of infection today. I have seen an English standard and I have seen the Australian standard and there are some differences. So just bear that in mind as you listen to us talk, because I know we have folks in about 60 different countries listening to us. There's going to be some variations between our standard and your standard, so my suggestion is to get with a judge from the country that you live in, or even someone that's more knowledgeable than you are. They can't help you break it, break down your standard, but we're just going to give you the basics today.
Speaker 2:
The other important consideration is by having a standard to hold yourself in your flock to is it should breed true forward and it's all about sustainability. If you set yourself up with a decent genetic pool and just a few good birds to start with, or a whole bunch of eggs from a few good birds to start with, you should not have to go out for more genetics ever.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, with the right breeding selection and keeping the fertility up, keeping the vigor up, keeping the health up, selecting them for standard to get that consistency.
Speaker 2:
And it's all in the book. What does that? Hopefully selected because it fits your environment the best and your needs the best, and then start from there.
Speaker 3:
Thank you, Another problem that I've seen is that folks have our own ideas and opinions of what we want in a folktale breed. But there is a particular danger when we start trying to take one breed and make it do something or perform in a manner it was never really developed to do. Well, let's just take body size. You got plymothorax of any breed, but all you're interested in is bigger body, faster growth. That's all well and good, but when you get those faster growing birds with the larger bodies on them, you're going to lose egg production.
Speaker 3:
Rocks were never developed to be a meat bird alone. They were developed to be both eggs and meat. Again, I'll use rocks as an example. If folks keep doing that, the breed is not going to look like what we know is plymothorax. They're not going to perform like what we know is plymothorax. You have literally taken one breed and changed it completely into something new and different and honestly I can't recall the single instance when that has really brought about an improvement in a breed. It always seems to backfire somewhere along the line.
Speaker 1:
That and if you want to be able to keep your hatch numbers up and you reduce the laying now, your hatch schedules will be different, or you may need to retain additional females which will need their feed and their space just to keep your quantity up, because if they do get too bred into the table side of things and you do lose the rate of lay, that'll change a lot about how you're able to keep them going from there.
Speaker 3:
Mandy, in your instance, you process a lot of your birds. How many more birds would you have to keep to maintain the same number of birds you get for processing if they only laid 55 or 60 percent of the eggs you're getting there?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, if they laid half as much, I would have to keep twice as many to keep the same schedule and now you lose your efficiency.
Speaker 1:
I really try to strike that balance because I saw in my own flock after about nine and a half pounds for an adult male that was too much, it was too big and it changed the look. It changed the bone, it changed a lot about them and I had to take it a step back and not pursue further size. And I've heard of 10, 11, 12-pound males on the breed, but they don't look like what the breed's supposed to look like. And then it changed the growth rate. It changed too much about them and just by being able to recognize when those changes were happening and keeping my mind away from developing tunnel vision, I was able to see it quick and correct it before I got too far down that route. But you do want to keep your eyes open and make sure you're not falling into a selection trap or you put too much pressure on one thing.
Speaker 3:
I like that term selection trap. Some folks call that coop blindness or barn blindness. They focus so much on one thing they lose sight or sometimes they even lose the whole ability to see the entire bird. And we got to keep the entire bird in mind and I'm not just talking about the way it looks, but the way it looks, the way it performs, the way it grows egg production, the whole nine yards.
Speaker 1:
It's so easy to lose that and you can do it really quick With how much breeding progress you can make in just a generation, the reverse is true, where just a generation can bring about more problems than solutions.
Speaker 2:
I like to look at my hatches, now that I have a 120 egg capacity per hatch. That's my goal and that's right where I want to be to find enough birds good enough to hold over and build my breeder stock and fill my freezer and have plenty of eggers to send off for sales. And I can see the birds that are going to be outstanding eggers and the birds that are just not going to be outstanding at all and I'll sell the ones that are going to be outstanding and the ones that aren't at all I'll put in the freezer, but the ones right in the middle that are the standard, those are the ones that I'm selecting to keep forward.
Speaker 3:
I think that's smart, john, because when we start selecting for extreme bird and we get away from that sort of flock average bird, that's when we can get in trouble, because we wind up with extremes that are all over the place where those birds that are in that middle parting flock, those are your more consistent bird.
Speaker 2:
That's what I'm shooting for is heterogeneity amongst the flock. I can spot slight differences amongst clans that all came from a particular hand, amongst the hands. But again, that's been my selection pressure on that. Everything that she hatched, or everything that she laid for a period of a month I set and hatched and selected down until I found what looked just like her and re-retained her and everybody else went away. And to me that's how you build her A flock.
Speaker 1:
Well, you're going to find the consistency here real soon by doing it that way.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 2:
And that's why the three-clan spiral mating system works as a sustainable model, because you're always keeping the hands together and you rotate the rooster from the clan over, and that's what keeps your vigor up, so you don't have to outcross and get I hate to say inbreeding depression, because it's an improper use of the word, because inbreeding doesn't inherently cause depression, no, it's inapplied inbreeding.
Speaker 3:
You know we talked a lot about the history and the theory behind standard. But how do we apply a standard, how do we interpret a breed standard and compare that breed standard to the bird or vice versa, the bird to the breed standard? That's where it can get a little tricky.
Speaker 2:
You got your book in one hand and your bird in the other, and that's where Mandy shines she is outstanding at her bird evaluation.
Speaker 3:
Yes, mandy, no longer than you've been in it, and I'm not saying that in a derogatory fashion, I'm just simply pointing out that you have come further, faster than most folks that I know that have only been raising poultry for the same length of time.
Speaker 1:
Well, it's my only hobby at this point. What is it?
Speaker 2:
10,000 hours will make you an expert, and then it's just a matter of how quickly you got through those hours, but you've selected and sorted through thousands of birds and you've refined your skills as a breeder, as your birds have been refined by your skills as a breeder.
Speaker 1:
Well, and I had some preexisting knowledge of standards, just from other species, because poultry standards were new and then I had never applied them to birds before. But I was already familiar with AKC dogs and dog showing horses their standards and looking at that outward expression of type and structure, with how long the back is or how short the back is, the angle of the shoulder, the set of the legs, that was already preexisting knowledge that I was able to apply. So when the poultry standard says a long bag, I knew I wasn't looking for the absolute longest back, but I was looking for a balanced shape that had a long back, that didn't have an illusion of too much length, because you want the balance to be there.
Speaker 2:
Right, you're talking a little bit about the old pencil trick.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah, like some of it's going to be almost. You have to be wary and watch out for those optical illusions because the thickness of the feathers around the hackle can affect how long the back looks the way the tail is the angle of the tail that can influence it. So you really want to be putting your hands on the bird and feeling what the actual back leg is and then looking at the other influences of what's affecting the look of it. But really you need to measure it first and get your hands on it and you're comparing bird by bird within your own flock. So you're not thinking of what your neighbor has, you're not thinking of what you saw at the show You're going through. Let's say you have 10 birds and they're all the same breed and you're comparing how they feel for that structure to find who does have the longest back, the shortest back, the medium back, and then, after you've evaluated the physical aspect, then you put them next to each other in cages and step back and look at them.
Speaker 2:
So you're not getting fooled by fluff.
Speaker 1:
Right, because you can have a longer back. Bird that's hiding it under the feathers.
Speaker 2:
Right. So you put your hands on it and in doing so you kind of build a mental picture of your bird in your mind, against the standard. At least I find myself doing that. I start at the head and neck and just work my way down and I'm going how are you compared to what I think I should be feeling? And I'm like you're good here, you're good here, you're a little narrow here, but again you're comparing them all against everybody in the flock and against the standard.
Speaker 3:
I think the most important thing when you start comparing a bird to a written standard is you've got to know what the written standards specifies or calls for. You have to know your breed standard. You need to spend time studying that breed standard before you ever start evaluating birds. And in the American standard of perfection that first 3940 page has really important information in there because it's got all your definition of term, your cutting for points and defect, what disqualifies a bird, all those sorts of things In that first part of the standard. And you know, if people would just read those first 3940 pages they would be so far ahead of most people today.
Speaker 1:
Oh, that's true.
Speaker 3:
So many people just ignore that and they go straight to the breed standard in the pictures. But know what your standard calls for and remember, don't get hung up on color, body type or shape. Have you want to phrase it is the single most important thing about a bird. Each breed has their own unique body type. Some of them are going to be similar in shape. There's going to be different. You got to know that.
Speaker 1:
I can't remember if it was 4-H or a poultry club, but someone put together just the black silhouette of different chickens. Yes, and the quiz was to name debris just based off of a black silhouette of the outward shape. I thought that was so neat and I got more than half of them right.
Speaker 2:
I found a feature on my phone that I can take a picture and look at it in silhouette and then I can put it into notability against the silhouette of a shanticleer that I have from Brother Adams and go, you know, overlay yes, overlay, no, bye If you want to get good at it, but it's also, you know, not getting fooled by the fluff and having that mental image. You can't make breeding decisions just by taking pictures and making silhouettes and doing overlays.
Speaker 3:
You know, in our standard today, the breed illustrations are in color. When I was first getting started, they were black and white and I thought back then, you know, this would be really good to say I mean, I love the pictures, but it would be better if they were in color. Boy, was I wrong? Because since it was all black and white, it forced you to look at type first instead of getting focused on the color, which is, oh man, that's a horrible trap to get into. Focus first on color, but that is so wrong. Focus on type, because type can be easy to lose.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 3:
Easy to mess up and once you lose it, it is really hard to get it back.
Speaker 1:
And you also want to make sure you're not inadvertently breeding forward any faults or flaws and really making sure that the spine is level and straight, it's not humped, it's not twisted, it's not, you know, off kilter from what a normal, good spine would be like. Same goes for the keel, the legs. All of those parts and pieces that make up the bird has a lot to do with how productive they're going to be able to be, how easily they could evade predators if they're built to range and do all of the chicken things they're supposed to be able to do. That ties in with their structure too. So good structure makes a good chicken.
Speaker 3:
Oh, absolutely. And this brings us to a point that when we're evaluating bird, there's one word to remember above everything else.
Speaker 1:
Balance.
Speaker 3:
Balance. There you go. Does the bird look balanced? And John mentioned the pencil trick. And you can use a pencil or you can use a small piece of dial rod or whatever you happen to have this round, but pencil and line with the leg. Look at the bird. Is it more bird in front of the pencil towards the head, or is there more bird behind the pencil towards the tail? You can tell it really quick whether that bird's in balance or not just by doing that little trick.
Speaker 1:
Yes, you can.
Speaker 2:
And it also shows you the set of the legs really well. And if the bird turns while you've got that pencil up you can check for a bow legged or a knock need. So that's a nice little visual check.
Speaker 3:
Sometimes I just use a finger and make sure everybody's good and I really wish more breeders would do this when they're looking for balance. Some males today and some breed are getting tails that are way too big. Yeah, I've seen that Monstrous tails.
Speaker 1:
It's too much.
Speaker 3:
It's flashy and it's showy, no doubt about it, but y'all know what the problem associated with getting big tails. Thank you for joining us this week and, before you go, make sure you subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they're released, and they're released every Tuesday. If you're enjoying this podcast, we'd like to ask you to drop us an email at poultrykeeperspodcastcom and share your thoughts about the show. Thank you for joining us for this episode of the poultrykeepers podcast. We'll see you next week.